The proposed research investigates the early development of information processing skills, focussing primarily on visual recognition memory in infants between three and eight months of age. The specific objectives of the research are to examine developmental changes in the nature of perceptual encodings of experiences, to explore very long-term memory abilities, and to examine the processes by which an infant comes to encode an experience for later retention. A series of experiments is proposed which use methods based on the phenomenon of habituation. These experiments explore a number of specific issues pertaining to the infant's ability to recognize visual patterns under a variety of conditions. Several specific extensions of these studies are proposed, including research on the infant's ability to abstract the common elements from a class of visual items and on the infant's ability to associate auditory patterns with visual patterns. The longer-range goal of the research is to obtain a thorough understanding of the early course of normal development in infant memory abilities and to relate this understanding to (a) the course of development of complex activities like language, (b) individual differences in development, and (c) patterns of abnormal development.